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Wild 90, 1968
You don't even know a good tuna sandwich on rye.
A trio of gangster types (Norman Mailer, Buzz Farber, Mickey Knox) are holed up in an apartment where they have apparently been laying low for a while. They have meandering conversations and take a series of visitors including a boxer named Kid Cha-Cha (Jose Torres), two police detectives, and a trio of women.
Can we take a moment to just appreciate that for all of the mocking of Millenials posting Instagram pictures of their breakfast or whatever, this film proves that over 50 years ago, someone still thought that a rambling, incoherent exercise in improvisation would be worthy of viewing?
Part of the fun in this Hall is the different kinds of bad that you get. Some films are just purely incompetent. Others are abrasive. Some are uninteresting failures.
This film is kind of its own breed. Don't get me wrong, it is incompetent, abrasive, and uninteresting. But it's kind of---in theory---interesting as a warning about the perils of ego. The nerve, the absolute nerve, that it takes to ramble through a mostly-unstructured improvisation is pretty staggering. And because it's so poorly executed, even the motivation stays obscured. Is this meant to be funny? Like, a parody of tough guys? Is this meant to be actually interesting and dramatic?
I will say that the level of ineptitude on display here does keep it from being actually offensive. In fact, weirdly it almost serves as a useful exhibit for why they find a certain kind of person/artist intolerable.
I did get a few laughs out of this one. The accidental glances into the camera. That one part where they close a door and a stack of cardboard slowly falls down one piece at a time. And the trainwreck element that the people in this movie even for a minute thought that what they were doing was entertaining enough to put in front of an audience.
Wild 90, 1968
You don't even know a good tuna sandwich on rye.
A trio of gangster types (Norman Mailer, Buzz Farber, Mickey Knox) are holed up in an apartment where they have apparently been laying low for a while. They have meandering conversations and take a series of visitors including a boxer named Kid Cha-Cha (Jose Torres), two police detectives, and a trio of women.
Can we take a moment to just appreciate that for all of the mocking of Millenials posting Instagram pictures of their breakfast or whatever, this film proves that over 50 years ago, someone still thought that a rambling, incoherent exercise in improvisation would be worthy of viewing?
Part of the fun in this Hall is the different kinds of bad that you get. Some films are just purely incompetent. Others are abrasive. Some are uninteresting failures.
This film is kind of its own breed. Don't get me wrong, it is incompetent, abrasive, and uninteresting. But it's kind of---in theory---interesting as a warning about the perils of ego. The nerve, the absolute nerve, that it takes to ramble through a mostly-unstructured improvisation is pretty staggering. And because it's so poorly executed, even the motivation stays obscured. Is this meant to be funny? Like, a parody of tough guys? Is this meant to be actually interesting and dramatic?
I will say that the level of ineptitude on display here does keep it from being actually offensive. In fact, weirdly it almost serves as a useful exhibit for why they find a certain kind of person/artist intolerable.
I did get a few laughs out of this one. The accidental glances into the camera. That one part where they close a door and a stack of cardboard slowly falls down one piece at a time. And the trainwreck element that the people in this movie even for a minute thought that what they were doing was entertaining enough to put in front of an audience.